Brené Brown gave a long interview to de Volkskrant recently. The headline was the kind of line that stops you mid-scroll: "Bravado is a mask for fear. The scariest people I know are frightened people."
Brown has spent more than twenty years researching shame and vulnerability. Her argument, in brief: what we mistake for strength in leaders, the hardness, the certainty, the refusal to be moved, is almost always a defence mechanism. Not strength. Fear wearing the costume of strength.
I have been sitting with this since I read it. Not because it is new. Because it describes something I see in almost every leadership team I work with, and that almost never gets named directly.
What hard leadership actually looks like
The leader who controls everything is not confident. They are afraid of what happens if they let go.
The leader who cannot hear criticism is not certain. They are afraid that the criticism will confirm something they already suspect about themselves.
The leader who dominates the room is not strong. They are afraid of what would surface if the room had more space.
These are not character flaws. They are survival strategies. At some point, in circumstances that may have had nothing to do with work, these people learned that showing uncertainty was dangerous. That admitting you did not know was weakness. That vulnerability cost something. So they built a version of themselves that does not show those things. And they have been running that version ever since.
The problem is that this version is expensive to maintain. It requires constant energy. And it poisons the environment around it, because the people who work with someone running that version learn quickly what is and is not safe to say.
The scariest people are frightened people
Brown's observation is worth sitting with for more than a moment.
The most frightening leaders are not frightening because they are powerful. They are frightening because they are afraid, and they have not examined that fear. It expresses itself as control, dominance, volatility, certainty that admits no alternative.
The leader who shuts down dissent is creating a team that cannot tell him when something is wrong. The leader who humiliates people who ask difficult questions is creating a team that stops asking difficult questions. The leader who mistakes aggression for decisiveness is creating a culture where the real conversation never happens in the room.
None of these people set out to do this. They are doing what they learned to do when things felt unsafe. The problem is that they are now in environments where their behaviour determines how safe it feels for everyone else.
What vulnerability actually is
Brown has spent two decades pushing back against the idea that vulnerability is weakness. Her argument is precise: you cannot build trust, cannot connect with people, cannot lead effectively, without being willing to be seen. Without being willing to be wrong. Without being willing not to know.
This is not softness. It is the opposite of softness. It is harder to stay in an uncomfortable conversation than to end it. It is harder to say "I don't know" in a room full of people looking to you for certainty. It is harder to change your mind publicly than to dig in.
The leaders who can do these things are not vulnerable in the sense of being exposed or weak. They are vulnerable in the sense of being genuinely present. And genuine presence is what makes people feel safe enough to say what they actually think.
What this has to do with performance
This is not a conversation about feelings. It is a conversation about performance.
A leadership team where people perform certainty they do not have makes worse decisions. A team where the leader cannot hear challenge loses access to the information it needs. A culture where vulnerability is punished loses the people who are honest enough to name what is actually going on.
The organisations that perform best over time are not the ones with the hardest leaders. They are the ones where people can say difficult things, where uncertainty is treated as information rather than weakness, where the leader's response to challenge is curiosity rather than defence.
That kind of culture does not happen by accident. It is built, deliberately, by leaders who have done the work of understanding their own fear well enough to stop letting it run the room.
The work Brown describes as necessary is uncomfortable. Looking at the fear underneath the behaviour. Understanding where it comes from. Recognising when it is driving decisions that are not actually decisions but reactions.
That work is not therapy, though therapy can be part of it. It is a different kind of conversation than most leadership programmes offer. Not skills. Not frameworks. A space where what is actually happening underneath becomes visible.
Once it is visible, the leader can choose. Not be chosen by the pattern that has been running on autopilot since before they had a company to run.
That choice is where real leadership begins.
Brené Brown's interview was published in de Volkskrant Magazine. Her latest book is Strong Ground.
Mees Loman is the founder of Loman Leadership, a leadership coaching practice for founders and leadership teams of fast-growing companies in Amsterdam and beyond. lomanleadership.com